US Army captain says top drone pilots are the ones who play video games when they get off on Fridays

Soldiers who regularly play video games are transferring those skills to flying drones, making them top pilots, a US Army captain told Business Insider.

At an exercise in southern Germany, BI saw how soldiers are designing, building, and flying cheap quadcopter drones, as well as working out problems in the field as the Army adapts to the challenges of drone warfare.

At the Drone Innovation Cell in Vilseck near the Hohenfels Training Area, Capt. Ronan Sefton, an intelligence officer in the Army’s 2nd Calvary Regiment, explained to Business Insider’s Graham Flanagan that there is a strong connection between gaming and the skills needed to fly a drone well.

“The top pilots,” the officer said, “the people who are learning the fastest, able to fly the most controlled, fly the fastest, and very accurately,” are gamers. “Those are the soldiers who, when they get off on Fridays, then go and play video games.”

Playing video games has applications when piloting uncrewed aerial vehicles, though it’s not exactly a one-for-one.

Transferable skills include the kind of hand-eye coordination that a gamer would have from playing with a controller and looking at a screen, which isn’t unlike flying a drone via a monitor or operating a first-person-view drone. The latter requires pilots to wear goggles similar to many of the commercially available virtual reality/augmented reality headsets. These present the world from the perspective of the camera on the drone.

Other skills include the ability to multitask, recognize patterns, maintain situational awareness, and comfortably interact with digital interfaces. Some studies have also shown that gamers have quicker reaction times and do well making decisions under pressure, potentially critical in high-stakes drone warfare.

US military personnel have been training to pilot small quadcopter drones in the field and through simulator programs, like one on display at a recent US Special Operations Forces exercise that simulated flying a drone through buildings and around a city. It can be more difficult than it appears, even with gaming skills.

Gamers still rise to the top, though.

In Russia’s war against Ukraine, Ukraine’s military has seen the value of having pilots who play video games, even actively recruiting for them to join the ranks of drone units. Some operators in the war have attributed their successes flying drones for reconnaissance and strike missions to their gaming skills.

There’s even a video game called “Death From Above” that puts players in the position of a Ukrainian FPV operator, prompting them to fly through the battlefield, target enemies, and drop bombs on vehicles.

But while the skills overlap, drone warfare isn’t a game. It’s an intense, high-stakes fight with real consequences. In the Ukraine war, a driver for modern drone warfare developments with small, cheap platforms, operators are priority targets for conventional threats such as artillery and newer ones, like other drone pilots.

“People think flying a military drone is like playing ‘Call of Duty,’ until they realize there’s no restart option,” an operator from Ukraine’s special drone Typhoon unit told Business Insider earlier this year.

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